Comment by jbverschoor
4 years ago
Yup.. Apple needs to grow somewhere. Cars? Maybe in terms of software.. The real margin currently is in cloud hosting. Even more than in appstore fees.
They've learned enough from using azure, gcp and aws. Their multi-billion contract with aws will end soon..
They will offer a fast energy efficient public cloud. First the xcode cloud, then their own hosting, and later it'll become public
Apple currently uses commodity PC hardware, from vendors including HP, and Linux as their standard data centre platform. I suppose it's possible they might start experimenting with Apple silicon servers in their data centres, but I doubt it mainly for supply reasons. They need all the 5nm TSMC fab capacity they can get for their consumer products. There's no way there's enough spare capacity to start diverting significant numbers of these chips into their data centres. Maybe one day.
But that's more of a short term blocker, isn't it? Fab capacity shouldn't be a roadblock to pursuing it long term. I could definitely see a desire to take all of the security and efficiency features and use them in the datacenter. E.g. it seems a bit silly that my Mac is encrypted with special hardware etc, but as soon as I sync my data to iCloud that security disappears.
> I suppose it's possible they might start experimenting with Apple silicon servers in their data centres, but I doubt it mainly for supply reasons.
I strongly believe they will, and that it's a natural progression.
Mac hardware is extremely popular with developers. M1 on Macbooks has lead to ARM platform Docker containers, which in turn will lead to a much increased demand for ARM platform Docker hosting. Meanwhile, ARM is much more power efficient than x86, and who has by far the best ARM CPUs for the foreseeable future? Apple.
I wouldn’t mind a cloud computing offering from Apple that allows you to keep your hands clean of customer data like CloudKit does.